


Chapter One Complete

by nyanbacon



Series: The Room Five [2]
Category: The Room (Video Game)
Genre: Based on theories, Mental Institute/Asylum, Other, The Null, mentions of self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 10:08:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyanbacon/pseuds/nyanbacon
Summary: I was able to bring the Null element from the Waldergrave Manor back to The Circle, but immediately upon bringing it back, they sent me on another one of their errands.My employers are keeping me from seeing the fruits of my labor. It frustrates me to no end.—Contains spoilers for the “Release” ending for The Room Three, and hints for the The Room One, Two and Old Sins





	Chapter One Complete

My research led me nowhere.

I was able to bring the Null element from the Waldergrave Manor back to The Circle, but immediately upon bringing it back, they sent me on another one of their errands.

My employers are keeping me from seeing the fruits of my labor. It frustrates me to no end.

I know they are still searching for Abigail Lockwood. With her husband dead, she has nowhere to go— nowhere known, that is. I tried to offer my services in the search for her, but they refused.

They said this was more important.

The file I was handed is thick and heavy in my lap. Even with the jostling of the train, it remains unmoved merely from its weight.

I’m afraid to open it. Despite being nowhere near the Null, the folder radiates a dark aura I’ve come to associate with the element.

For the first time since leaving Waldergrave Manor, I am afraid.

When I ask the receptionist at the mental institute to see the patient, she looks at me with what can only be admiration. I still hadn’t looked at the file, so I don’t really know why. She says she’ll call a doctor to take me to the patient, and that I could take a seat while I wait, so I do.

I take a few moments to think things over, running my fingers along the spine of the folder in my lap, before finally my curiosity gets the better of me, and I open the file.

The topmost piece of paper is crumpled and folded, and written on in haphazard cursive. I pick it up. The paper is grimy against my fingers, rough with unknown material. Dirt probably. I wrinkle my nose.

 

_I don’t know if this letter will reach you. I only know the warden will take my bribe. You must come at once!_

_When we opened the gateway, something was waiting. It had always been waiting… now it is here. Soon we are doomed._

_I know you have no reason to trust me, but you must. You are the only one who can help. You are the only one who knows._

_You are the only one who will believe me!_

_I am in Bethlehem._

_Find me._

 

The symbol on the bottom of the page holds a familiarity that makes me shudder and fold the letter hurriedly. I can’t stand to look at it. I know the letter wasn’t addressed to me- I know nothing of the author- but yet it feels like it was talking directly to me.

There was no addressed to.

The file is full of paperwork- all sorts of transcripts from interviews with the patient. The doctors get mad at her before they can get answers they understand.

I understand them perfectly.

The Null is coming.

In the back is a collection of gruesome photos. At first I just glance over them, uncomfortable at the sight of blood, but when I see the last photo, I look back through them, closer.

Her skin is engraved with symbols that I recognize- symbols that are all too familiar. The triangle; the circle; the S shapes-- they’re all here.

The runes that protect the Null. She engraved them on her skin. To keep the Null out.

I am pulled out of my panicked thoughts by a doctor calling my name. I quickly rise to my feet, safely tucking the papers away in the folder. I know what I am dealing with now.

It does not ease my nerves.

“So you’re from the Royal Institute?” The doctor asks as we walk, and I nod. “What department do you work in?”

“Investigation of foreign objects,” I state- the cover name for The Circle, because the common man can’t know of our true intents. “We believe the patient may have come in contact with an object not native to Britain, so we’ve been sent to research it and see the effects.”

The doctor nodded. “The Null.”

Just the name sends goosebumps up my skin. “You know of it?”

“She talks about it a lot. Can’t keep quiet about it.” He opens a locked door. “She disturbed the patients so much we’ve had to isolate her.”

She’s alone in a cell, with nothing but a table and two chairs. There are bandages around where the runes were engraved into her skin. I can’t see them, and yet I’m convinced I can feel the energy they radiate. Dark, hateful energy. Just like everything the Null has touched.

She looks up at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. I know from the files that she doesn’t sleep, rarely eats, and everyone is convinced she’s defying orders.

I know better than that.

“Take your time,” the doctor says before shutting and locking the door.

I sit down in the chair across from her. She watches me. Despite the dark presence of the runes, I feel comfortable with her.

She the only one who truly knows the danger like I do.

“The letter never reached the recipient,” she says. Her voice sounds distant, despite her being right in front of me.

I put the file on the table and opened it. The letter is on the top of the paper stack. “It was intercepted.”

She stares at it in what might almost be disgust. “Put it away. I don’t want to see it.”

I close the folder. “You wrote it.”

“I did.”

“What’s wrong with it now?”

“I don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach.

“... the interviews,” I start.

“You have the transcripts.”

“I do.” I set my hand on the folder. “But I want to hear it. From you.”

She stares. I stare back. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she unfolds.

“You’ll call me crazy.”

“I’m not here to call you crazy.”

She leans forward. “You can’t tell The Circle.”

My heart skips a beat. How does she know?

“How do you know about them.”

She narrows her eyes. “How do _you_?”

“I want to hear your story,” I state suddenly. Then, softer, “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

After a moment she sits back, and starts from the beginning.

Her husband was enlisted by The Circle to research the Null, only for him to go missing. A colleague, only known as A.S., contacted her, pleading for help from her husband. She went in his place and was sucked into the world of Null, having to solve puzzles like I had to escape.

After escaping the Null’s astral plane, bouncing around time and space until she was dizzy, she’d pursued research with what she knew of the Null only to find dead ends- until she’d ended up at Grey Holm because of a tip from the Royal Institute, where a puzzle crafter designed puzzles for her to solve to prove she was worthy to know the truth of the Null. In the end, however, it seemed the Craftsman has merely been a puppet of the Null too, like everything else had been.

When she escaped, Grey Holm was destroyed by the tentacles (I could still imagine the way they moved across the surfaces they touched and the panic they instilled when they moved towards me), and that no one believed her that Grey Holm had ever existed.

But I do.

She looks at me fearfully, but relieved, when she finishes. I don’t shun her.

Keeping true to my promise, I tell her about Waldergrave Manor, and about Abigail and Edward Lockwood. She pales as she listens to the letters I’d found from Edward, and the extraction of the Null sample. I don’t tell her where I took it. I’d already figured out I shouldn’t have taken it at all.

“It taints the people it touches,” she says slowly, in reference to the Null.

“Drives them crazy,” I confirm.

“I can feel it. On you.”

I pause. “... I can feel it on you too.”

“It’s dark.”

“Keeping you here isn’t making it go away.”

She leans forward. “I need to get out.”

“I want to help.

“Get me out.” She pauses. “We can stop it together. The something.”

After a moment I nod. “I’ll get you out…” I pause, not knowing her name.

“Abigail,” she says after a short hesitation.

I make the connection before she has to say it.

**Author's Note:**

> The games haven’t explained anything so I picked an ending from The Room Three, and constructed the theory that Abigail Lockwood, after escaping Waldergrave Manor, became the main character in the first three games, and the reason The Room: Old Sins was called ‘Old Sins’ was because it was telling her backstory.  
> Still waiting on another game, Fireproof!!!


End file.
